QupZilla Reborn!

codepoet80

Maybe the end is not nigh -- Claude Code to the rescue!

Me and my favorite AI co-worker spent the past two weeks of background time and (expensive) foreground tokens, iterating on Nizovn's QupZilla port source code. For those newer to the community, this parting gift from the legendary webOS dev in 2018 was a mostly-modern (at the time) web browser, built as a PDK app for TouchPad (and another one for Pre3).

While PDK apps are great for apps that are happy in a sandbox (most games) they were never a perfect approach for apps that work best integrated into the OS. It did, however, bring an updated web rendering and SSL stack to our beloved devices, allowing us to stay online a little longer.

My initial goal was to try to update that rendering engine, from QtWebEngine 5.9.7, which uses Chromium 56, to something newer than 2018. Unfortunately, it was not as simple as replacing the inner core -- Nizovn also built packages for Qt5.9 that are required, and not compatible with a newer QtWebEngine. Re-building all those dependency packages was out-of-scope for even Claude and I working together. Just getting QupZilla itself to build in 2025 was multiple days and nights of iteration!

I decided instead to do some remediation and updating on the QupZilla browser wrapper, bringing some modern features, and hopefully some better webOS integration, to the 2018 code. The most important is a Reading Mode, based on Mozilla's Readability.js which strips Javascript and other clutter from a web page, showing just the content. This dramatically improves the odds that QupZilla can render a readable page -- even with its old engine.

More features are in the works/plan, but if you'd like to play with the (still slightly crashy) Beta, you can grab it here:

https://github.com/codepoet80/qupzilla-webos/releases

Merry Christmas from the last webOS developer! Maybe AI and 2026 will bring us some more devs/dev ideas..?!

codepoet80

After many more hours of iteration and bug fixes, I'm proud to share a release quality version of QupZilla 2.3.0.

{Qupzilla Screenshot}

Of course, there was no QupZilla 2.3.0, because that browser is dead. But if there were, it might have a Reading Mode, that strips websites down to just the relevant content improving both readability and compatibility, a Dark theme, so that it looks and feels more like a webOS app, and better integration with the OS itself. It might also have a number of bug and stability fixes that make it faster and less crashy.

It would have been nice to update the rendering engine, but that proved to be too much even for Claude and I combined. Nonetheless, I've been using it for the past few days and the web is much kinder to my TouchPad now. When a website loads too slowly, I can disable Javascript or Images. When a site refuses to load because it thinks that browser is too old, I can spoof a more modern user-agent and trick the site into loading.

In support of this launch, I've finally fixed another problem: difficulty accessing nizovn's Preware feed, which was only available over HTTPS. Of course, if you have a proxy setup, this hasn't been an issue, but when bootstrapping a new (or newly doctored) TouchPad, things are a lot easier with this new feed.

As with the original QupZilla release, you must have nizovn's QT-enabling pre-reqs packages installed first. Again, the Preware feed is the easiest way to handle this:

Grab the feed URL, or the individual packages, here:

https://docs.webosarchive.org/browsers/#homebrew-browsers

Or, if you're inclined, read the source, the docs or grab the release, here:

https://github.com/codepoet80/qupzilla-webos